GotNews owes between $500,000 and $1 million to unspecified creditors, the bankruptcy petition states. The website estimated its total assets between zero and $50,000 dollars.

It was not immediately clear where the value of Johnson’s personal brand fit into that calculation.

Splinter first reported the filing. The troll site must supply the list of creditors by Wednesday, and that list will offer a peek into who thought it was a good idea to finance Johnson.

GotNews made its name spewing a mixture of hatred and false allegations, including one article that reportedly made it to the desk of President Trump. Over the years, the website generated absurd, easily disprovable “reporting” alongside race-baiting articles, all complemented by Johnson’s own Holocaust denialism.

The website was reportedly forced to pay $19,900 to Michigan teen Joel Vangheluwe, who Johnson falsely accused of driving the car that killed activist Heather Heyer during the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

GotNews and Johnson reportedly agreed to the settlement in July 2018; GotNews has been offline since September 2018. The April 24 bankruptcy petition suggests that the Vangheluwe family was to be notified of the filing.

The bumbling 30-year old Holocaust denier’s website failed to file several documents with the initial petition. If it doesn’t refile correctly by Wednesday, the bankruptcy case will be thrown out of court.

It wouldn’t be Johnson’s or GotNews’s first time being thrown out of something. Johnson has the distinction of being the first person to receive a lifetime ban from Twitter, after asking for donations to “take out” activist DeRay McKesson.

Neither Johnson nor an attorney representing him in the bankruptcy case immediately replied to requests for comment.

Josh Kovensky
is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.